August 2022 – Blog – STL Law Review

Absconding husbands, homeless wives and helpless creditors: Safeguarding the interests of stakeholders during enforcement proceedings

Alvin Sia

LLM Candidate, Peking University School of Transnational Law

Women’s property rights were restricted by social norms in imperial China.^[1] Property was passed down through male heirs.^[2] In most cases, wives could not inherit property upon their husband’s death.^[3] Most property brought by a wife into marriage belonged to her husband’s family.^[4] Meanwhile, a wife was beholden to her father before marriage and subordinate to her husband after marriage.^[5] Against this backdrop, there is a Chinese saying that “a wife pays for her husband’s debts”.^[6]

This saying still holds true under existing marriage laws of the People’s Republic of China. Creditors may enforce against property owned jointly by the non-debtor spouse … Read the rest

Climate Migration to the Russian Federation from a Legal Perspective Itself in Continuous Development

Nikita Gonta^[1]

Peking University School of Transnational Law

I. Introduction

With numerous catastrophic effects, climate change threatens to increasingly displace countless people around the world. The impending impacts range from entire states disappearing as a result of rising sea levels to nearly one-third of humanity staying in extremely hot and uninhabitable areas, according to most extreme projections.^[2]At the same time, projections indicate that due to global warming, the climatic conditions in Russia, which as the northernmost nation-state is largely covered with permafrost, should generally improve.^[3] Global warming is already changing the climatic living conditions in Russia: 63 percent of the land was considered unfavorable for living between 1961 and 1990; between 2001 and 2010 … Read the rest

Will the Chinese government tax robots?

By Zhu Zhimeng 朱知萌 Peking University School of Transnational Law

1. Introduction

The digitization and automation of the global economy have the potential to destabilize what is arguably the world’s most important tax tool–personal income taxes. Therefore it has wide-ranging economic and social implications.^[1]

These effects include but are not limited to, an increase in the gap between rich and poor, an increase in unemployment, and a reduction in national tax revenues. After reviewing global literature, I found that the overall international consensus of experts is that it is imperative to tax robots.

In June 2017, Nobel laureate Robert Shiller said that to alleviate the income gap caused by the robot revolution, it is necessary to reconstruct the … Read the rest